


In the Dark

by orphan_account



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Coma, Depression, Gen, Hospital, Memory Magic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-05-25
Updated: 2011-05-25
Packaged: 2017-10-19 18:30:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,693
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/203962
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When Luna's mother dies, the blast puts Luna into a coma. She recovers in St. Mungo's. Her father waits. The Healers wonder what even happened.</p>
            </blockquote>





	In the Dark

**Author's Note:**

> Mostly canon-compliant. May become part of a longer work exploring the events of the series from Luna's perspective.

  
“She was a quite extraordinary witch, you know, but she did like to experiment and one of her spells went rather badly wrong one day. I was nine.”   
  
Luna is nine. There is an accident. Her mother dies. She is admitted to St. Mungo’s.

Luna has just turned ten and her father has just returned to work. The Healer in charge of her case at St. Mungo’s says that while progress continues, there will be no sudden breakthrough, no rapid and huge alteration, and so it will be better if he does not sit by her side and wait. She emphasizes that progress is continuing, but Xenophilius hears only that it will continue to drag on the way it is. Though he was never known for his journalistic prowess, his first article back on the job is so bad that he is given what they carefully do not call a demotion, sorting through mail from readers to look for things to publish on the gossip pages. He only leaves the office to visit Luna or his wife’s grave. He even sleeps at the office.

Luna does not sleep, but she does not open her eyes. She sees. The Healers are not entirely sure what she sees. It does not appear to be prophecy. She speaks sometimes, when the room is very quiet. She speaks to her mother. There is debate on whether it is complete delusion. The spell that her mother had been attempting was obviously complex. The Department of Mysteries has become involved but each and every request for information, including why they have any interest, is denied.

The return to consciousness from what the Healers have decided to provisionally term a magically-induced coma is not a sudden process. Luna does not simply wake up one morning ready for breakfast and conversation on the news. Three months after admission, when her eyes are held open, a Legilimens is able to detect activity in the mind. She describes “a dazzling silver light from all directions and a sense of agitation and fear.” The Department of Mysteries, who continue to collect reports on her case for their own purposes, issues the Healers what amounts to a formal statement that the spell Miss Lovegood’s mother cast would probably have been silver in color.

Another month later, Luna begins to move. She opens her eyes, which seem so much bigger than they did before the accident. Her hands try to grasp things. She tries to get out of her bed, but she is too weak after such a long period of bed rest. None of this is in response to a stimulus that others can comprehend.

Xenophilius is told to go on sabbatical. He still does not return to his house., choosing instead to rent a room in the Leaky Cauldron.

Luna starts screaming in the night. After casting the appropriate charms to keep her from disturbing the other patients and determining that she is not in any pain they can detect, the Healers are actually heartened by this. After all, it only occurs at night, showing the establishment of a sleep-wake cycle. A Legilimens reports that she is having nightmares—but a wizard from the Department of Memories comes to collect all memories related to said nightmares from the Healers. A detailed report in Luna’s case file that no one can quite remember is replaced by a notice that she is dreaming of the spell that her mother cast and that further attempts at investigating the contents of Miss Lovegood’s nightmares will be prosecuted as a violation of Section Six of the Code of Magical Mysteries (Part L, Experimental Magic and Potions, Subsection Four, Unknown Aftereffects).

It is a Friday in August. Sunlight is streaming through the windows. Luna requests a cup of water. This is not unprecedented. What is unprecedented is that when the Healer manages to sit her up and place the water in her hands, Luna takes a drink, and quietly thanks her mother for bringing it to her. The Healer stays just long enough to explain that she is not Luna’s mother before running from the room to tell the rest of the team.

Xenophilius is contacted immediately, but by the time he gets there, she has lapsed back into her own world and will not respond to any attempts to get her attention. He thanks the Healers for telling him anyway and cries when he gets home. Perhaps he will get his Luna back. Perhaps he has not lost both his wife and his daughter forever. He is finally able to go back to work, and his writing improves sharply. He turns down an offer to return to his old job, writing three paragraph articles about winners of chocolate-frog-eating contests, wizards who complain that the Ministry should do something about particularly hot summer days, and creators of popular children’s toys. He wants a flexible schedule, he says. He wants to be able to return to Luna’s side when he is needed.

Luna is ten and one half in October. She has made great progress, the Healers say. It is true that she can only identify who she is talking to one time out of three (unless it is her father, who she can identify three times out of four), but she responds to what is going on around her. They have begun physical therapy to counter the effects of lying in bed for over eight months. Often, she understands that she is at St. Mungo’s. A little less often, she understands that she is a patient. The Healer in charge of her treatment believes that it “would not be in her therapeutic interest” if she was told that her mother is dead. Xenophilius easily agrees.

The Department of Mysteries announces that they have no further interest in Miss Lovegood’s case, except of course to wish her a full recovery. Several documents are missing from Luna’s file after that visit, but no one remembers what they were. There is some evidence that her memory has been altered, but this could just as easily have been the aftereffects of the initial spell damage. 

It is decided that in January, if things proceed as they have been, Luna will be able to come home. Young minds are elastic, and she continues to make progress. The Healers suggest that Xenophilius prepare the house for her arrival. Molly Weasley had said something to one of them about their house being in bad shape the last time one of the twins broke an arm.

It is Christmas. Xenophilius comes as early as St. Mungo’s will allow visitors to arrive that morning. As he walks to the fourth floor, he spots Augusta Longbottom dragging her grandson Neville down the hall to the Janus Thickey ward. The pair visit almost as often as he does and he’s come to recognize them. Augusta stops to wish him a Happy Christmas with venom in her eyes. It is the first time she’s spoken to him. He realizes that she probably thinks he’s lucky.

Luna knows who her father is every time now. He is the only one she can consistently engage with. She mentions that the food is better than usual and he smiles. A few months ago, she had no idea what was happening around her at all. Now she can track events over days, sometimes a week or more. 

When he mentions that it is Christmas, she smiles brightly. He gives her a fine blue quill, ink charmed to change colors, and several rolls of parchment. She cries when she realizes she has nothing to give him. She weeps into his arms when she realizes she has nothing to give her mother either. 

She is inconsolable when he tells her that she will not be able to see her mother. 

It is New Year’s Day. Luna spends the entire day writing a letter to her father, when she remembers that is what she means to do. She writes about wanting to come home. She writes about the last time she had gone on an interview with her father, only a week before the spell accident no one has told her about, when they had gone to see the ailing Newt Scamander. It has begun to bother her that her memories of that day are clearer than her memories of the past few months. She writes about wanting to see her mother.

Xenophilius does not come to the hospital that day. Instead, he goes back to his house.

He walks straight through the kitchen, straight up the first flight of stairs, the second flight of stairs, and into the hallway facing his wife’s home office. He stands in the doorway. The cleanliness is the clearest sign that something is amiss. His wife could never keep her papers straight, always leaving them in piles on the floor, with just enough space to edge back to her desk or to the corner where Luna’s desk sat.

He reaches his arm in far enough to reach the doorknob, pulls the door shut, and casts the strongest locking spells that he can think of. As he cleans the rest of the house, carefully avoiding the master bedroom, he sometimes returns to the office door to cast another spell.

Luna is ten and three-quarters. Xenophilius has taken another sabbatical from work. He spends a full day making the house secure for a young woman who cannot be relied upon to remember what she is doing. He uses charms meant to secure things for small children and modifies them to keep her from wandering out of the yard. He wonders if she will be ready to go to Hogwarts in September.

At the end of the day, he goes to St. Mungo’s. The Healers shoo him away when he tries to ask them about care instructions for the third time that day, the umpteenth time that week. Instead they steer him to his daughter, sitting on the bed with the few things she’s brought here collected in a shopping bag.

“Are we really going home, Daddy?” she asks. 

“Yes,” he tells her, and they do.


End file.
